I. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to apparatus for the selective addition of onserts onto finished magazines and post production off-line processing with fully automated postal sortation stock generation for ultimate mailing. More particularly, the invention includes a method for selectively adding the onserts to magazines or the like using a programmable vision system for sensing and decoding a dot code pattern defined as a portion of a mailing label.
II. Description of the Prior Art
Printing companies involved in the production of magazines, catalogs, and the like, often assemble the finished magazines with onserts and "tip-ons" which are then together placed in a polybag for mailing to the recipient. These onserts, such as advertisements comprised of loose sheets or booklets, are typically stored in separate bins which are sequentially positioned along an assembly line above a conveyor belt. When a bin is selected, it dispenses one of the contained onserts onto the magazine as it passes thereunder. Typically, up to 3 bins may be used for containing onserts. While these onserts are individually rather inexpensive, in a high volume setting, it is economically desirable to only add certain onserts to magazines which are to be sent to selected recipients on who demographic information may be known. Marketing departments or advertisers typically decide which onserts are to be added to the magazines based on demographic studies. For example, subscribers having a certain zip code representing a wealthier neighborhood may receive selected onserts with their magazines that only these types of households would be interested in. Some advertisers choose to provide advertisements wit magazines to solicit certain age brackets, or households with certain educational backgrounds. The selective addition of onserts to the magazines is also important so that the subscriber will not be overwhelmed with to many onserts. Finally, it is economically desirable to selectively provide the onserts to selected subscribers to avoid waste and to reduce mailing charges.
Applying bar codes on mailing labels of magazines is one method known in the art for automatically selecting which onserts are to be added to a particular magazine prior to bagging. A bar code reader will sense a unique bar code defined on the mailing label of each magazine which is representative of the intended recipient. Bar code readers, however, are very "unforgiving" when sensing a bar code that is not uniformly oriented under the reader. As such, they tend to have degraded performance if the label bearing the bar code is skewed or rotated from a preselected orientation during scanning. The machines that apply mailing labels after they are produced by, for example, ink jet printers, are not known to uniformly position the mailing labels upon the magazines. For instance, labels rotated up to 15 degrees, or offset 1/8 of an inch laterally, are common. Therefore, bar code readers can have a degraded performance if the placement and orientation of the mailing labels with bar codes is not rigidly uniform.
Optical code readers are also well known in the art, but tend to have a degraded performance for most of the same reasons as bar code readers. They are not very forgiving to a misaligned or misoriented code relative to a reading station and as such, their performance can be degraded if a code is oriented or skewed from an ideal alignment. Thus, these different systems are not ideal for sensing information on mailing labels in this particular application.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,025,610 to Graushar teaches an apparatus and method for selectively packaging magazines. The system utilizes a controller which accesses a data record, such as a magnetic tape, throughout the entire assembly process to determine which signatures are to be incorporated to form a particular book. This data record is also accessed if onserts are to be added to the magazine. The drawback of this invention lies in that the computer is tied-up throughout the entire assembly process of the magazine. The processing of re-orders to replace damaged or unacceptable magazines is difficult, and processing magazines off-line, such as magazines manufactured elsewhere, cannot be accommodated.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,953,841 issued to Polarek teaches a machine and process for separating book pages by sensing signatures. This system teaches a decollator for disassembling incomplete books and sorting identical signatures into groups for re-use. The invention of that patent uses a video camera rather than a bar code reader or a line scanner. In the "separation mode", pages having a corresponding indicia, such as ellipse or a triangle, are separated into groupings.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,768 teaches an inserter based mail manifesting system. The system uses well-known optical character readers to detect code information. Thereafter, provision is made for preparing a manifest which is to accompany that batch of mail.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,034,985 to Keough teaches a matched mailing system employing address print array recognition. This invention comprises a machine for matching an address on an envelope to an address on a document, and when a match results, the document is stuffed in an envelope for mailing. This system implements an optical character reader where, the entire address is scanned to obtain a print array representative of the address. The address label needs to maintain precise alignment such that the optical reader can sufficiently and accurately decode the address label.
The processing of finished magazines is a unique process having its own design constraints, thus making prior art solutions only moderately suitable to such a process. Thus, developing a system which is uniquely adapted to the environment of selectively adding onserts onto magazines by sensing address labels is desirable.